PR Pro Toolbox: Muck Rack Trends

When looking to craft messaging for your client or organization, it’s always important to stay relevant not only when positioning language for your audience but especially in the fast-moving, current news climate.

There are many tools to help you measure audience interest in special topics. One of the most popular is Google Trends. Google Trends aggregates Google search queries and topics to show how many people are searching keywords. But,there’s a new player in town — Muck Rack has joined the trend game, unveiling its own trend tracking tool: Muck Rack Trends.

Muck Rack Trends allows users to measure their organization’’s performance against their competitors and compare article search terms. This tool displays the amount of times articles mention a given term, the top media outlets and journalists covering a term, and share of voice over a set period of time. Google Trends can track a search term’s overall popularity and compare terms on a relative scale out of 100, giving users a general idea of what people are searching for on the Internet. Muck Rack’s tool gives more detailed and specific numbers and data points that are focused on news mentions, perfect for those in journalism and public relations fields looking for resources to quantify message impact.

Looking for more ways to spot trends for your client? Check out BuzzSumo, a database that can show you what trending web content is being shared on social media, what platforms it’s being shared on and how much people are engaging with it. On BuzzSumo’s Discover dashboard, you can check to find trending content sorted by topics such as news, sports, entertainment, tech, business, video, fashion, science and more.

Have a more specific topic that you would like to check on? BuzzSumo’s web search feature allows you to search for a term, topic or domain. The results will feature the most-shared web content with your search term, and what platforms the content has been shared on.

Adding new resources to your PR toolkit is always an important way to improve your campaign research or refresh your strategies. Keeping up with your client’s industry and societal trends enables you to keep bringing the best PR practices to the table.